Anthropic tops 34.4% business share

Ramp said on May 13 that Anthropic had moved ahead of OpenAI in its latest measure of paid business AI adoption, a reversal in a market OpenAI had led for much of the past year. The fintech company’s May 2026 AI Index showed 34.4% of businesses in its dataset paying for Anthropic services in April, compared with 32.3% paying for OpenAI. The index is built from corporate card and bill-pay data across more than 50,000 companies that use Ramp. TechCrunch reported the change on May 13, citing Ramp’s latest release and comments from Ramp economist Ara Kharazian. ### What exactly did Ramp measure? Ramp said its AI Index tracks the share of businesses in its customer base that make paid transactions to AI vendors. In the May 2026 release, the company said Anthropic’s adoption rose 3.8% in April to 34.4% of businesses, while OpenAI’s fell 2.9% to 32.3%. Overall AI adoption across Ramp’s dataset rose 0.2 percentage points to 50.6%, according to the same post. (ramp.com) TechCrunch said the figures reflect “verified business customers” inside Ramp’s expense-data sample rather than a full census of the market. The publication also said the sample covered more than 50,000 companies, which Kharazian described as broad enough to be useful even if it is not a perfect proxy for all business AI spending. (ramp.com) ### How big is the change from a year ago? Ramp said Anthropic’s rise has been steep over the last 12 months. In May 2025, 9% of businesses in the dataset were paying for Anthropic products, TechCrunch reported, and that figure climbed by 26 percentage points over the following year. Over the same period, OpenAI’s share declined by 1%, while the share of businesses using some kind of AI product increased by 9%, according to TechCrunch’s account of the Ramp data. (techcrunch.com) Ramp’s own May 13 post said Anthropic had “quadrupled” business adoption over the last year, while OpenAI’s business adoption grew by only 0.3%. That wording differs from TechCrunch’s description of a 1% decline over the same span, but both accounts describe Anthropic gaining sharply and OpenAI losing its lead in the latest reading. ### Why does Ramp say Anthropic pulled ahead? (techcrunch.com) Ara Kharazian told TechCrunch that Anthropic had already been leading among “high adoption groups like finance, tech, professional services.” He said OpenAI still led in other firms, but that gap had been narrowing over the past couple of months. (ramp.com) Kharazian also told TechCrunch that Anthropic’s strategy had been to start with a technical customer base, focus on those users’ needs and then broaden out through products including Cowork. Ramp’s post did not present the lead as settled, and Kharazian wrote that the results should not be read as proof Anthropic is the definitive long-term leader in business adoption. (techcrunch.com) ### How much weight should readers put on this index? Ramp said the index is based on observed spending by its own customers, which means it measures paid usage inside a large but bounded sample. TechCrunch noted that the dataset only represents companies that use Ramp, making it an imperfect stand-in for the broader enterprise AI market. (ramp.com) TechCrunch also pointed to OpenRouter’s leaderboard as a separate signal. The publication said OpenAI last ranked above Anthropic there in December 2025, suggesting the direction of travel was visible outside Ramp’s customer base as well. ### What could change the standings next? (ramp.com) Ramp’s May 13 post listed three risks to Anthropic’s lead, including higher customer costs, recent product dissatisfaction and compute constraints. Kharazian wrote that cheaper inference platforms and open-source models were among the fastest-growing vendors on Ramp’s platform in the prior month, a sign that price pressure remains active in business AI buying. (techcrunch.com) May 13 is the latest published checkpoint in Ramp’s monthly series, and the next update will show whether Anthropic keeps the lead in a fresh month of expense data. Ramp Economics Lab said readers can follow subsequent releases through its AI Index page, where Kharazian publishes the monthly figures. (ramp.com)